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Wine

06/16/2011

There are some dangers in wine consumption. Some of the dangers are more in reference to home made wine.

The dangers for home made wine could be:

Lead poisoning: You need to use food-grade containers at all stages of the wine making process. It can taint the color and flavor of the wine as well.

Sterilization: Everything should be sterilized and rinsed out multiple times to get rid of the sediment, bacteria and oxidization.

Racking: Everything has to be clean. If the juice is allowed to sit too long, it will create a musty flavor and smell because of the dead yeast.

Contaminated Materials: Anything that is in contact with the wine must be sterilized, especially your hands. Any contamination will affect the taste of the wine. If bacteria of any kind gets into your wine, you chance your whole production smelling bad and tasting like vinegar. Oxygen and bacteria ruins wine because it produces an acetic acid.

Headaches: Tannins and histamines in the wine causes head aches. Tannins are more prominent in red wines and to get the proper balance requires experience.

Tomorrow is wine weekly round up and a recap of the event Awake and Living sponsored on Wednesday night. What an amazing night! Excited to share it will everyone!

06/15/2011

"Most important thing about wine is the grape. Starting out with really high quality fruit. Once you get the fruit into your winery, sort out all the clusters and move out all the material other than the grapes.

It helps prevents more problems later down the road.

You then decide to make your red wine; you crush the grapes with your feet or by a machine. A lot of machine’s now days they rip off all the stems. So rip off all the stems before crushing the grapes.

Then you can give your crushed grapes a cold soak for two or three days. Without adding any yeast. That’s with dry ice. It chills the wine below temperature that yeast can survive and thrive in. Once it starts to warm up in three days, you add a yeast that is specifically for red wines, There are many types of yeasts available which will give different nuances of flavor to your wine. Some people like to use wild yeast, but it’s really difficult to get all the yeast to complete fermentation. So it’s problematic in it’s self.

Once you inoculated it’s just the matter of monitoring, checking the temperature and sugar levels and follow the fermentation by letting the yeast do all the work. Sometimes you can add nutrition for the yeasts to complete the job. That added nutrition could be dead yeast, particular nutrients such as B vitamins to help the yeast with the fermentation.

Once the fermentation is completed I press it in a press basket, the wine comes out, settle it then put it into a barrels, that’s called racking. When you rack it a number of times then at some point… one or two years down the road you can bottle it. And that’s the story about making a great table wine."

Not too easy is it? I hope you now have a better understanding of wine and the complexity of the wine making process.

06/13/2011

I've always wondered who was the genius that created wine? The earliest discovery of fermented grapes was found in Georgia, the former soviet republic, which took place 8,000 years ago.

"Biochemical tests on the ancient pottery wine jars from Georgia are showing that at this early period humans were deliberately adding anti-bacterial preservatives to grape juice so that the resulting wine could be kept for longer periods after fermentation. The preservative used was tree resin, which contains several bactericidal compounds." Website

Wine usually is made from grapes. It is fermented fruit juice which turns into alcohol. When grapes ferment, a natural chemical balance occurs so it's not necessary to add any sugar, acids, enzymes or other nutrients to the wine.

When yeast is added to crushed grapes, the yeast begins to consume the sugars and converts them into alcohol.

Since there are over 5,000 varieties of wine grapes and over 600 species of yeast, it makes it easy to explore different textures, smells, colors and to experiment with producing your own unique taste.

My Uncle Eric started making wine three years ago. His amazing patience and dedication to his hobby has grown extensively to planting hundreds of vines and producing spectacularly delicious wines. Picture of vines on top.